Studio Practice 2AINTERROGATION

EGRD2010NIELS ESELGROTH

Stencils have always been a big part of my work. Here I have used them to create canvases with a certian theme. The style of the canvases is very street art based,made with spray paints and acryllic for the backgrounds. In an attempt to challenge what I was previously used to which was stencilling t-shirts, I drew a handfull of sketches interrogating what ideas I could come up with in a certain amount of time. These sketches all had a similair theme throughout. Based on Satyrical Parodies each drawing depicts an object or animal in a parodical way. I will go further in depth with each drawing as it comes up. Many of the ideas came from random moments in which I would see or think of something and then make a connection in my head with another object. Then it would be drawn out in a collage style either comparing the two elements or contrasting them agaisnt eachother. Initially i painted the stencils onto cardboard very in flow with the street art and urban feel. This technique works very nicely but I had grown bored of it since i had done a lot of it before. Keeping in theme with the parody I realised that if I used canvases everything would fit together very nicely. Canvases have obvious connotations of exhibiting work, fine art and painting. The fact that I stenciled and made distorted and messy ‘street art’ on this medium goes hand in hand with the parodical feel. The canvases also serve for another purpose. All of these paintings are being exhibited and are up for sale at a live music venue in London in Shoreditch. Therefore I painted on canvas to make them easier and nicer looking to hang up on a wall. So far I have sold four of them. Each painting is unique is 14” by 24”.

Entitled ’Wise American?’ This was the first canvas I did, made with a hand drawn sketch of an American Soldier with an owls head and serious weapons in his possesion. Made with the intention of parodising wise, violence

friendly american soldiers. The owl has a missing eye, showing that it has been to war and sustained injury but still stays true to the american flag. In a more general view, it looks upon war with a sceptical viewpoint.

Entitled ‘Blades of Feather’. It depicts a dagger crossed against a feather similair to those used for writing. The background is made with swipes of red acryllic and over sprayed yellow

spray paint. The knife and feather are obviously two almost opposite objects, but here they are mainly playing on the idea of old plays. Written carefully and precisely they always end in deaths.

Entitled ‘Statue of Peace’ I seem to have some form of obsession of a dystpoian view of America. Because of this America always seems to be very easy to parodise in my eyes. Here the Statue of Liberty and what it stands for, epsecially the torch

that signifies light and hope through all darkness that could occur. Depicting her holding up the peace symbol emphasises on the lack of peacefullness of America, it was as if she had changed her mind and realised that America needs peace.

Entitled ‘Killing the Dead’ Another theme that runs quite frequently through my work is that of violence and war, personally I’m quite against both and for this reason I enjoy parodising it or poking fun at it.

Here we see a skull with bombs of different colors and shapes falling all around it. The ‘stupid’ of killing and death is addressed by showing something already very dead being killed more and more without mercy.

Entitled ‘Cut the Cord?’ This painting, inspired by a photo of an astronaut floating in space, shows a man in full space gear doing the same except with a pair of scissors apparently contemplating whether to cut the lifecord or not. Here

many things can be interpreted, but what i wanted to convey is the fragility of life and how we mess around with it on a large scale. If one of the few laws of our universe didnt exist as it does, life would be impossible.

alcohol is spoken of metaphorically as fuel. This is a satyrization of the detrimental threat of alcohol on ones body, domestic violence towards women, and the violence outside pubs between drunk people.

Entitled ‘Fuel the Fire’ This canvas has some very clear connotations. A jerrycan full of petrol leaks into a whiskey tumbler overflowing with gasoline. What this image connotes is all the different manners when

Entitled ‘In Cannibalism we Trust’ Another parody of America, the national bird of America, part of the presidential seal is here depicted tearing the American Flag. I sat thinking about the society we live in, how much people prey off the poor and helpless just to further their ownings

and widen their bank accounts. A colleague of mine Mwape Ndilila did the illustration of the eagle for me, which i then stencilled and drew in the american flag. The idea of this is the Vulture Culture of dog eat dog that resides in America.

Above, entitled ‘One Nation Under Big Brother’. There is a phrase that goes ‘One nation under CCTV’ that is often used in street art. I wanted to create some sort of piece that commented on the over surveillance that goes on within London. Obviously the London skyline is quite iconic; the London eye, the Millenium Dome and Tower Bridge amongst others and as a sillouhette it is a very strong graphic. The logo of Big Brother is placed above, just hovering over the city in a manner very similair to that of the all seeing eye in Lord of the Rings, but instead of watching over middle earth, London.

Right, entitled ‘Smoking Ideas’. This is a satyrical piece based on all types of creatives, artists, journalists and at a strech even musicians. It is a known fact that journalists especially smoke a lot whilst writing, and artists smoke whilst painting too. So this is a parody where a ciggarette is changed for a pencil, from which come smoke fumes in the shape of butterflies; very beautiful and geometric animals. It is based on coming up with ideas whilst smoking.

Left, entitled ‘Candle in the Bulb’ This is a simple comparison/parody of the old and modern. They are two different light sources, one natural flame and the other man made electrical current. It is meant to question the sustainability and effectiveness of electricity in the face of Global Warming and Nuclear waste. A simple canlde will provide hours of very cheap light.

Above, entitled ‘Spray the Revolution’ A spray

can with a fist coming out of its nozzle is depicted

with the words Spray the Revolution written down its side. The strength of art, especially street art

in our modern culture is one that we should

not neglect. We should put more power and emphasis on getting

out on the streets and painting the walls with

our personal manifestos.

Left, entitled “Pop Piss’ The famous image of Marylin Monroe’s skirt getting lifted and blown up is edited here to make her appear to be squatting. From between her legs is a large dribble of yellow paint, obviously coming from the squatting Marylin. What I wanted to be clear here is the over glamourisation of popstars and the way they are viewed as superior when they are not.

Above, entitled ‘Roll the Cards’ is a parody of gambling and how it is seen as a bit of fun for the average person when it is actualy a huge money making business and funded by large cooperations. The dice are made to appear like the ones hanging in a persons front window, casual decoration.

Previous page, entitled ‘Lock-pick’ Although from feedback Ive been told that this is not necessarily the most comprehensive canvas I think the idea is possibly one of the best - simpe yet very clever. It is meant to be a key, but instead of the prongs and notches that make up a normal key this has a safety pin on the end, the perfect tool for a lock pick. It’s a shame it isn’t easier to understand.

After doing the ‘Shooting stars’ brief i found myself intrigued by video editing and post production. Whilst making a set of photo albums for a friend I decided to film it all so I could later speed it up and edit it into a short video with background music. As i was making it the music and the video didn’t fit together well, so I decided to change the song and edit the video so that the music and the image flowed nicely.

After starting on the video editing I’ve been doing more and more. I found about half an hour of footage of a gig I went to see when I was younger of my friends’ band. I downloaded thier short EP and chose their most known song and made a short music video with their live footage. The programme I used is iMovie,i thought that if I were to work out the basics of video editing I could then move onto Final Cut which is a very complex but reasonably easy to use programme.

These are two other videos I made with footage that I had from a while ago. The first is another music video for a friends band and the other is a video montage of my friends and I at a festival. I have two other video projects im working on aswell, one of the Independent Practice Exhibition at uni and the other of a friend of mine who is a tattoo artist and did lots of tattoos in my lounge whilst I filmed. I’m really looking forward to working on these as i have filmed them in HD, hopefully I’ll be able to include them in my next IP portfolio.

Even before I came to University I was very inspired by working with stencils and textiles; working with both to make my own designs on t-shirts or jumpers. From there I moved on to the first steps of screen printing. During the past two years of University (foundation and first year) I’ve also found myself deeply interested in book making – designing and binding books to perfection has rapidly taken over as my main hobby.It was during foundation that I was taught how to bind both soft and hard cover books and in my first year when i really took these skills further. I used what I had learned to make my final project; a set of books focussing on dif-ferent areas of abstract photography. I really enjoy the two sides of this process, creating the book digitally and then binding it all together by hand. I feel it is a great way of merging these two methods/techniques. With each book i bind i feel that I get closer to perfecting the process and now my mind starts to drift off into ways in which i could challenge the ‘book’ concept.One main theme that has always seemed to stick with me is music. I grew up on a sailing boat with my parents, we did a lot of travel-ling and for many years listening to music was almost a past time for me. Therefore when i came across Vaughn Olivers books last year in a workshop with him i was blown away. The way he transforms the music of the Pixies into

Independent Practice Proposal

books with such finesse and amazing artwork really impressed me.My use of stencils has slowly evolved since i started. They began as small, maybe 10cm x 10cm, their purpose being for patches which i would then sew onto my clothes. They then evolved into t-shirt size and now I work with life size stencils for canvases/wall pieces. I really enjoy this technique but i feel as if I’ve gotten all that i can out of it, therefore I’ve re-ally been pushing myself to learn and perfect the art of screen printing. I’m not too far away from setting up a screen printing studio in my flat and I’m really looking forward to using it as a means to design t-shirts and clothes. I like this technique because it’s extremely similar to stencilling (negative spaces,black and white illustrations) but it’s more advanced. I would like to use this technique for book printing and publishing as well.I would really enjoy creating a piece that also addresses some of the issues within society that are less reflected upon. For example many times I’ve found myself wondering how much everything is blown out of proportion and actu-ally how much of a difference we make on our planet. I would like to find the balance of signifi-cance between the human race and our envi-ronment. Some other processes i would like to look into is video editing, and photography.

LAB Week Evaluation

During the LAB week I found myself getting very inspired, but what I enjoyed most was the variety of things in wihich I was getting inspired. On the first day we had a talk by The Girls. This talk was interesting although I couldnt see where any of it could really help me with my work. The other talk by Mary Ikoniadou I found a lot more interesting, the idea that she had published all the magazines independently and from that had managed to work her weay up the ladder I thought was very clever. The talk on illustration by Roderick Mills showed how you can make money out of doing what you love as long as you have the persistence to become prominent in that area. Finally the talk by Rober Rubbish was my favourite. Le Gun delves into t-shirt design, magazine publishing, installations and party planning. To me that was a perfect mix. The workshop I went to i was a bit disapponted about but tried to work with all the same. We had to republish and translate Mary Ikoniadou’s edition of ‘Making Do’. I thought this didnt have much meaning, and because the workshop was presented as a workshop on authorship, which I thought would be good for me as I enjoy book publishing.All in all it was an inspiring week, and although the workshop i attended wasn’t what I had expected I still think it went very well and the whole week was very enjoyable.

Bibliography Independent Practice

Influences for canvases :

WEBSITES- fumantwo.com

- streetartutopia.com

- whoartnow.co.uk

ARTISTS- Mr. Brainwash

- Banksy

- Roa

- Andy Warhol

- Richard Hamilton

- John Mc Hale.

MAGAZINES AND BOOKS- Computer Arts Projects

- Graffitti Panet 1, 2

- Pictures of Walls

- Stencil Graffitti

Inspiration for video :

- Skrillex - Rock n Roll

- Modestep - Sunlight

Music for Videos :

- Skream ft. Example - Shot yourself in the foot Again

- Skipho - Julieta Venegas

- The Hysterikals - Estado Policial

- Nero - Promises (Skrillex Remix)